Abstract

Primary health care faces challenges concerning high malnutrition rates. Attention to documentation is important for ensuring that health care professionals in primary health care deliver appropriate and timely nutritional care and treatment, hence maintaining continuity of care and enhancing patient outcomes. Healthcare professionals’ competencies have been shown to be of great importance in delivering high quality documentation and nutritional care. This aim of this study was to investigate the routines, knowledge and attitudes towards nutrition and documentation in primary health care of the primary healthcare workforce. Using a descriptive cross-sectional design, a validated questionnaire on registered nurses, social and health service assistants, social and health service helpers’ attitudes, routines and knowledge about nutrition and documentation was delivered to eligible participants. The questionnaire was distributed to 1,391 eligible participants in a municipality in Denmark. The overall response rate was 32%, leaving a total number of 449 respondents. The study shows that the level of nutritional knowledge and nutritional routines and documentation practices was poor in all three healthcare professional groups. The respondents showed large variations in knowledge and routines, hence complicating the accurate transfer of relevant nutritional related data in the patients’ healthcare record and thereby compromising continuity of care. Overall, the three groups of healthcare professionals indicated a somewhat positive attitude towards documentation and nutrition and regarded nutrition and documentation as a part of their area of responsibility, although there were discrepancies in the self-perceived degree of responsibilities among the groups of healthcare professionals. The regression analysis conducted in this study showed that a high degree of nutritional knowledge and attitudes did not determine nutritional routines. This information suggests that a focus on increasing healthcare professional’s nutritional knowledge may be redundant if the organizations and management do not continuously articulate and prioritize nutritional care and documentation.

Keywords: Cross-sectional Study; Primary Health Care; Community; Healthcare Professionals; Healthcare Personnel; Knowledge; Routines; Attitudes; Documentation; Nutrition